Our first Members’ Post at ClimateCultures is from Laura Coleman, founder of ONCA an arts space she created in Brighton.

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There are two spaces in the world that I think about every day

The first is a small piece of the Bolivian jungle. I have watched it grow, flood, burn, and grow again. The creatures that live there – rescued, sheltered and cared for by Bolivian and international staff and volunteers – have, over the last ten years, threaded through me, to the point that I dream of them. There is one in particular, a puma. Her name is Wayra, and she is one of my closest friends.

The second space is a building, in Brighton, England. It has four floors, a basement and a cave (tunnel included). It has been a hairdresser’s, a Middle Eastern food store, a mod bar, an Internet café, and an empty shop. Five years ago, it became ONCA. ONCA is an arts and performance venue that I started after coming home from the jungle, having no clue what to do with the stories I found now sitting at the base of my stomach. I didn’t realise that ONCA would be radical, or important. I just wanted to find a way to tell stories like Wayra’s.

Spaces for looking into the change

After five years, ONCA has developed a life of its own. It has become a beautiful venue, providing more support, solace and community than I could ever have imagined. That makes me proud, not proud to have had the idea but proud to have had the opportunity to watch it become what it has. Proud to be part of the community that has shaped it. Because I believe that spaces like ONCA are important. There are a few arts venues that are trying to acknowledge the urgency of the times that we live in, and attempting to provide a framework for creatively engaging with those times, and ONCA is one of them. ONCA was set up to explore and raise awareness of environmental issues through art, but since environmental change and human culture are so inextricably linked, we find ourselves exploring immigration, human health, happiness and economics, just as much as plastic pollution, flooding and species extinction.

I have thought a lot about what arts venues need to, and can, be, since starting ONCA. So much so, I am now researching a PhD on the topic. Although they are worlds apart, quite literally, it is possible to find similarities between spaces like ONCA and spaces like the refuge I go to in Bolivia. One of things that ONCA does so crucially, I think, is embedded within our mission. We do nothing in the building, or outside it, that doesn’t touch on environmental and social urgencies. One of the major barriers to environmental communication is the ease with which we, as a society, look away from things like climate change. ONCA, by its very nature, looks – or at least we try to. We try to practice what Donna Haraway so eloquently calls ‘staying with the trouble’. “It is not possible,” she says, “to stay with the trouble among us without the practice of joy. That the practices of joyful, collective and individual pleasure are essential to the arts of living on a damaged planet.”

As is, simultaneously, grief. This is something that both she, and others like Joanna Macy for example, have argued for a long time. Staying with it then, through joy and grief both. This is what we try to do, at ONCA, through such arts as play, craft, enquiry, DIY ritual, dialogue and creative action.

What I found in the refuge in Bolivia, I believe, was similar. For whatever reason, I ended up spending a lot of my twenties all day, every day, in a very small piece of the Amazon rainforest, with a puma. Making sure that she, above all else, was as happy as she could be. And she wasn’t particularly happy most of the time, if I’m honest. She was scared and confused. Due to her history, she could never be released. She would always live in a cage, and she would always have to be dependant on people like me.

Despite that, she trusted me. She trusted me and even, at times I thought, was happy to have me around. Despite the fact that her life had been irrevocably damaged, when her mother was shot, when her trees were cut down, when her jungle burned, her capacity, I believe, to feel joy, and to bring joy to other lost ones like myself, was staggering. That, in turn, gave me a clue about how necessary it is to grieve for what she, and other creatures like her – humans included – have lost, and are losing every day.

Spaces for the joy and the grief

Spaces where the joy and the grief of this is made real, is made possible, is made communal, are so urgent. I don’t think it matters what kind of space – a little camp in the jungle for lost creatures, a bricks and mortar art gallery in central Brighton, an online blog, a community centre, a sports club, a church. As the earth seems to alter more rapidly each week, this is a cry to hold onto our spaces, and to create new ones, to step through the door, over the gate, across the river, into the screen, through the glitter curtain, and look our ruins honestly in the face.

I am about to go back to Bolivia for half a year. I am balancing the impact of the air miles with my need to see Wayra again. She was three when we met, she is thirteen now and getting older by the day. Before, I thought that being in Bolivia meant leaving ONCA behind. I don’t think this is the case anymore. ONCA and the jungle are two spaces, on opposite sides of the world. Somehow they have become entangled. I am not sure what this means yet, maybe I will never be sure. Maybe I’ll spend the next six months trying to find out.

Find out more

For more than 20 years, Communidad Inti Wara Yassi in Bolivia has been working for the benefit of wildlife rescued from illegal trafficking, giving disadvantaged youth a sense of purpose through involvement with wildlife care, and educating the Bolivian public to respect wildlife. Find more about CIWY at www.intiwarayassi.org

ClimateCultures is where we connect to explore cultural responses to environmental and climate change issues.

A space for artists, researchers and curators

ClimateCultures is where we connect to explore cultural responses to environmental and climate change issues. We welcome creative minds working in all art forms (writers, visual, audio, performance and other artists), research disciplines (sciences, humanities and social sciences) or curatorial practices (galleries, museums, archives and online).

To share creative conversations

This is a forum to discuss and demonstrate how arts and culture help us to make sense of our changing climate, and the possibilities our imaginative responses can offer.

Where boundaries are porous and fertile

ClimateCultures arises from shared experiences at creative gatherings, where artists and researchers reconnect with issues that flow across and between our different ways of seeing and understanding what the ‘environment’ and ‘climate’ suggest.

The Anthropocene, environmental crises, climate change…

They grab headlines, trigger controversies and discussions and provoke action and reaction, but it sometimes seems we haven’t got very far agreeing what these things are, what they need from us, what we can do. They cut across and complicate environmental and development priorities. Species and habitat loss, water resources, farming, poverty reduction, health, social justice and economic wellbeing all seemingly compete with them for attention, but in reality they’re all interlinked in a web of so-called ‘wicked problems’. We can manage ordinary ‘tame’ problems with conventional approaches, but wicked problems resist solution because of their complex interdependencies, the uncertainties that pervade them and the way limited attempts to tackle one issue cause others to get worse.

ClimateCultures centres ‘Climate Change’ as both the specific focus (the changes to our atmospheric, geological, water and biological systems as a result of increasing global temperatures and greenhouse gases) and as shorthand for this larger complex of wicked problems. A growing awareness of our changing relationships with the rest of nature is captured in suggestions that our species has brought the world into a new phase: the Anthropocene. This emerging truth of the ‘Age of Human’ confronts and tangles with an older truth that the world we’re changing is and always has been more-than-human and beyond our attempts to control it.

Many sites explain the problems or offer straightforward solutions. Rather than straight answers, this is a site for finding ways through the tangle of questions. How do you and other artists, researchers and curators approach climate change; what drives you to create something that touches on it; what inspires particular work; what gets in the way; what would you like to know or learn from others? Answers will emerge from a community of the curious, through guest blogs, questions, discussions and the work you link us to.

Why contribute your thoughts, concerns, ideas? Because we’re all struggling for ways to capture the big issues in our small words, images, sounds and gestures. Because we have different ways of knowing what Climate Change means, and the different frames, filters and lenses we habitually see the world through also shape what’s possible within the Anthropocene. Because we all have work to offer. Because conversation is creative. Because this is an experiment, an enquiry, a joint excursion into things we don’t know.

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